Mikayla Harden: What Stopping Stones essentially does is we commemorate the lives of enslaved people through micro-monuments—memorial stones. The stone has the name of the enslaved person—“enslaved here,” because we try to keep the stone where an enslaved person lived, worked, and worshiped. Then also the date, or the record, of enslavement.
We are currently at over 350 memorializations. Most of our memorializations are centered in New England. We do have some outliers, such as a few stones in California, two stones in Texas, and then we have a cluster of stones in the Mid-Atlantic. But we are mostly heart-centered in New England.
What are the conversations like with the K-12 students in your “Witness Stones” project, which teaches children about slavery?
MH: With the Witness Stones Project, it does a lot of work teaching students empathy. Students go into the classroom, and they spend four to six weeks learning the story of a person who roamed the neighborhoods that they live in, worked in the communities that they're currently living in, but also a person who is not a part of the story that they learn essentially in the classroom, or in state and local history. And so the students, in a way, have a very personal and deeply connected way of thinking through a person's marginalized experience. And what we've learned from the Witness Stones Project is that children take on the empathy ofunderstanding the harms that happened to someone in the past. They may not fully grasp what enslavement was; they may not fully grasp the violence that it is. But they're able to understand the feeling of not being treated fairly, and what it means to become a victim of things that you didn't cause.
We've even had students try to do summer programs where they're trying to continue to uncover their neighborhood's ties to enslavement just because they felt really passionate about the stories, but also wanting to become an advocate for someone who just didn't have a voice.
You got your start studying the histories of enslaved children. Why are children—both as subjects and as students—so important to your work?
MH: Children are the building blocks of America. They are essentially how we forge a country, how we make a nation. If you don't have children, you don't really have much of a nation. But also—how do you raise children in a system that is created to exploit them, and also how do parents essentially combat that exploitation? Oftentimes Black children are disproportionately represented in Black burial grounds, so for me to understand Black life, I have to look at Black death. I became really, really captivated with Black parental love—how do you find grief and love in the same place? And I think, also, working with students who feel very passionate about how children of the past lived — because often when we teach people American history, we teach them this very adult, white story, you know, but we don't teach them about the young story of America. That's also why I became fascinated in teaching children, but also writing about children's histories.
What does it mean to memorialize slavery at a time when our country is doing everything it can to forget slavery? How do you keep going?
MH: I remind myself that there has never been a point in Black history where we have not been under attack. We've always had to fight for freedom, fight for what we believe is right, and also fight for our stories to be told. I do think that with each generation there's a new fight that has to be had, but we've never been without a fight. And I think what really brings life to me is having conversations like this—partnering and collaborating with organizations that want to contend with the work. And so what Stopping Stones does is we allow people to put that narrative in the landscape, in the ground around them, so the story can be told—but also so people can reflect on what it means, as you walk down the streets of Boston, that this was where an enslaved person lived, worked, or worshipped.
